The very structure of American entertainment bears minstrelsy's imprint. The endless barrage of gags and puns appears in the work of the Marx Brothers and David and Jerry Zucker...The stump speech is an important precursor to modern stand-up comedy.
The 1830s American stage, where blackface first rose to prominence, featured similarly comic stereotypes of the clever Yankee and the larger-than-life Frontiersman; the late 19th- and early 20th-century American and British stage where it last prospered featured many other, mostly ethnically-based, comic stereotypes: conniving, venal Jews; drunken brawling Irishmen with blarney at the ready; oily Italians; stodgy Germans; and gullible rural rubes.
Stereotyped blackface characters developed: buffoonish, lazy, superstitious, cowardly, and lascivious characters, who stole, lied pathologically, and mangled the English language. Early blackface minstrels were all male, so cross-dressing white men also played black women who were often portrayed either as unappealingly and grotesquely mannish; in the matronly, mammy mold; or highly sexually provocative.
Most minstrels projected a greatly romanticized and exaggerated image of black life with cheerful, simple slaves always ready to sing and dance and to please their masters.
Stereotypes embodied in the stock characters of blackface minstrelsy played a significant role in cementing and proliferating racist images, attitudes and perceptions worldwide...However, unlike vehemently anti-black propaganda from the time, minstrelsy made this attitude palatable to a wide audience by couching it in the guise of well intentioned paternalism. Blacks were in turn expected to uphold these stereotypes or else risk white retaliation. Popular entertainment perpetuated the racist stereotype of the uneducated, ever-cheerful, and highly musical black well into the 1950s.
- Snips from Wikipedia articles on Minstrel Show and Blackface
I put it to you that the media stereotype of typical Americans today is as demeaning and disempowering to them as the minstrel show's depiction of blacks was to the Jim Crow era Negroes. The audience for the media's minstrel show is made up of the corporate elites, laughing up their sleeves in their gated communities at the ignorance and gullibility of the masses, as the media conglomerates ratchet the American stereotype to ever greater depths of bellicose stupidity. And, just as minstrelsy made racism seem humorous, today's media lineup makes the plight of the American middle class seem simultaneously no big deal and vaguely self-inlficted. It also makes "uppity", "shrill" progressives easy to cull from the pack and stigmatize.
This generation of young adults are the first generation to be born and raised in a post-Fairness Doctrine media era, where politics was just another commodity to be advertised, caveat emptor style. They are also the first generation to spend huge amounts of their childhoods immersed in violent video games, which retired Army generals have campaigned against as "training in insensitivity and murder". They are the second generation of latchkey children, left to fend for themselves by the need for both parents' income. Of course, they are not the first generation to be subjected to advertising; but today's advertising is not just about products - its about indoctrinating people in corporate culture:
...there it is: the unending drama of consumer unbound and in search of an ever-heightening good time, the inescapable rock 'n' roll soundtrack, dreadlocks and ponytails bounding into Taco Bells, a drunken, swinging-camera epiphany of tennis shoes, outlaw soda pops, and mind-bending dandruff shampoos...Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival, our slang-speaking partner in the quest for that ever-more apocalyptic orgasm. The countercultural idea has become the capitalist orthodoxy.
Consumerism is no longer about "conformity" but about "difference"....We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock 'n' roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breeaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60s, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer...The anointed cultural opponents of capitalism are now capitalism's ideologues.
- Thomas Frank, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent", in "Commodify Your Dissent" (1997).
Corporate media is a hugely sophisticated, extremely well-funded psychological warfare operation against middle class democracy. Decades-long campaigns have bent the English language in Orwellian fashion, leaving small or local content providers massacred in droves. (Try to find a copy of Mr. Frank's words above in your local bookstore or on TV.) Words, like citizen and employee, have been disappeared. Vague, dis-empowering words like "consumer" and "associate" have taken their place. With this linguistic framework established, media minstrelsy is hard to disentangle from the manufactured background of everyday language. Jacques Ellul calls this technique "deep sociological propaganda".
Television, movies, and first-person shooter games are god-awful crap. But if you are poor and overworked and tired, TV is the only free entertainment you can get; and video games are about as affordable as alcohol. So you take them into your life. And when you take them, you invite all the media minstrelsy stereotypes to colonize your consciousness.
In the world of media minstrelsy, the average American likes to party and hates to think. He loves his family and his god; and he distrusts teachers and scientists. He wants to buy a lot of cool stuff on credit. He wants to eat all kinds of fatty, unhealthy food. He supports anything the police and the military do, because he is "patriotic" and "law-abiding". He is "tough" and "practical" , "entreprenuerial" and "optimistic" - never chronically ill, a Jeffersonian democrat, unemployable, or "bitter".
When these cultural stereotypes are translated into politics by professional pollsters, advertising agencies, and spin doctors, the average voter shows up as: anti-intellectual (codeword: anti-elitist), anti-tax (if they didn't take "my" money, I could party-hearty), family-valuing (you should pay to school the five children I couldn't afford to have), self-centered suburban louts(why is gas so expensive?).
Yeah, there are a few angry middle class folks, but the stereotype is a club to beat them with:
Blacks were in turn expected to uphold these stereotypes or else risk white retaliation.
People get fired from their jobs for the wrong bumpersticker. People get ostracized from their churches for the wrong political position. People get thrown in jail for demanding that the police respect their civil rights. (And all of that goes onto their employment record as a big black mark.) Authoritarian crackpots like James Dobson can make or break politicians.
Resistance is out there, just as blacks resisted the blackface stereotypes:
In the early days of African-American involvement in theatrical performance, blacks could not perform without blackface makeup, regardless of how dark-skinned they were.
Despite reinforcing racist stereotypes, blackface minstrelsy was a practical and often relatively lucrative livelihood when compared to the menial labor to which most blacks were relegated.
Black performers used blackface performance to satirize white behavior.
- Wikipedia
Shows, like the extremely popular "My Name is Earl", openly implode the minstrelsy stereotypes into caricature, even as they introduce subversive themes like karma, and portray life in an American small town with Dickensian overkill.
Edgy performers, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, have been referred to as "court jesters". I think of them more as satirists of corporate minstrelsy. They give the finger to the ideas that Americans are loyal to corporations and the sellout politicians they own, that they cheerfully work for their own enslavement, and that they always say: "thank you sir, please hit me again".
Well, that's my lame attempt at channeling George Lakoff. Thanks to "The Magistrate" for introducing me to the word "minstrelsy".
arendt
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